How to Become an Expert Magento Developer? Explained in 5 Steps

Want To Become an Expert Magento Developer?Follow These 5 Steps

As an increasing number of businesses are adopting the ecommerce platforms, leading ecommerce CMS solutions like Magento are experiencing huge demand. Magento, being the most versatile, value-driven, scalable and flexible ecommerce CMS is already used across a plethora of leading ecommerce and business websites across the globe. The CMS has also received great traction among the startups and small and medium enterprises. No wonder, expert Magento development services are now getting tremendous demands from the businesses across all sizes and niches.

When a business hire Magento developer, it obviously considers the expertise and the portfolio of apps created by the developer over time. Naturally, as an aspirant of Magento developer career, you need to develop strong credentials with practice and continuous learning.

Here through the length of this post, we are going to explain some of the key steps to learn Magento and become an expert Magento developer.

1 ) Learn the Magento Basics

At first, you need to start by learning the basics of Magento development and the required skills. The CMS platform involves some complexities that you need to learn to deal with. You should have coding expertise with PHP, for working with the latest Magento 2 version. You also need to learn the basics of HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery.

Apart from having expertise and experience with these programming languages, you also need to be versed with modular development by using OOP and MVC architecture. As for databases you also need to learn the basics of MySQL. As for caching, being familiar with Zend cache is important.

Lastly, as ecommerce stores need to compete heavily for search engine ranks and to generate organic traffic and sales, being familiar with Search EngineOptimisation (SEO) is also crucial.

2 ) Know How Magento Works?

How actually Magento works as a CMS platform for online stores? Does it work in a different way than other CMS platforms? How to use the CMS in a step by step manner to build an ecommerce store? These are the important aspects on which you need to have a solid grasp when learning Magento.

The first and most important way to learn how the CMS solution works are to start with the admin panel. Go to the admin panel and know the various aspects like setting up products, shipping, pricing rules for catalogs, setting up shopping cart rules, etc. In order to learn using these admin panel elements, take help from the Magento official documentation.

Apart from the official documentation, you can also learn from various web sources and open forums. When practicing your Magento skills, you can get stuck at places and then you can post questions to the online community across forums and question-answer platforms like Quora, Reddit, StackOverflow Exchange, and Magento forum.

Apart from these self-learning ways, you can always enroll in official Magento courses and learn all the basics of the admin panel and various ways to use them for building online stores.

3 ) Take Magento Certified Developer Exam

When hiring Magento developers, generally organizations look for certified Magento developers with some real project experience. Obviously, certification is something that ensures the companies about the expertise and skills of the Magento developers they are going to hire for their projects. It is also worth admitting that an official Magento developer certification will help you get a stronghold on the basics of Magento development.

Official certification from the makers of Magento will help you sharpen your programming skills and garner higher competitive edge compared to most developers. This certification is also a way to evaluate your skills and expertise level.

The web is literally full of various helpful resources for learning Magento development and having a solid grasp on the latest trends in Magento ecommerce development. As a Magento career aspirant, you can always stay tuned to the latest trends, tricks and effective ways of building Magento ecommerce and business websites. Through these resources, you can also garner your skills for Magento extensions development. These resources will also help you to make your development skills better over time.

5 ) Build a Command on These Magento Tricks

Finally, there are some development tricks that you can always find helpful and effective when building an online store with Magento. Some of the key tricks that you need to have a command on including the following.

Editing Files: The first and foremost rule that every frontend and backend developer working with Magento follows is that you can bring changes to a core file of Magento without taking backup. The effective practice is to build a default theme folder on that same level and give a new name to that folder.

Editing Template Files: The second rule that Magento developers should follow is to make a copy of the original file when editing a template file. After copying you can just upgrade the changes in the copied file. After evaluating the changes with the copied theme file, you can incorporate changes in the original theme file.

Editing Layout Files: When editing the layout files, you first need to build local.xml file and thereafter incorporate all the new theme elements into the folder for the new theme layout.

Choosing the Best GUI: The expert Magento developers always consider JetBrainsPhpStorm as the best GUI for Magento development. It comes with robust support for an array of crucial features for Magento development such as PHP 5.5 support, enhanced PHP syntax coloring, SSH console, remote tools, debugging and testing enhancements and Magento framework support.

Choosing the Best Plugin: Based on the easy to use features and several other factors PHPStorm plugin is regarded as the best plugin for Magento development. Some of the key features that make his plugin great include XML node documentation, autocomplete for factories, and PHP code evaluation for Magento.

Best Development Environment: As for choosing the best IDE for Magento development, PHPStorm and Netbeans are most preferred. Apart from these, extensions such as Eclipse and Zend Studio are also considered as popular.

Conclusion

Finally, to excel in Magento development, you should also take part in a variety of Magento events that take place throughout the year. The expertise in Magento development is always gained over a period of time than just following a particular path.

Bio: Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading Magento Development Company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about eCommerce, online retail, technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. His leadership abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well